Research
My research is in the area of artificial intelligence, and includes contributions in the areas of artificial intelligence and education, computational linguistics, spoken language, and user modeling. My work has included both fundamental research and applied research resulting in technology transfer and patents. My most recent research has been in the area of Speech and Natural Language Technology for Educational Applications. Currently funded projects include:
- (ArgRewrite) Development of Human Language Technologies to Improve Disciplinary Writing and Learning through Self-Regulated Revising
- (CourseMIRROR) Enhancing Undergraduate STEM Education by Integrating Mobile Learning Technologies with Natural Language Processing
- (Discussion Tracker) Development of Human Language Technologies to Improve the Teaching of Collaborative Argumentation in High School English Classrooms
- (eRevise) Response-to-Text Tasks to Assess Students' Use of Evidence and Organization in Writing: Using Natural Language Processing for Scoring Writing and Providing Feedback At-Scale
- Studying Collaborative Dialogue with a Teachable Robot in a Mathematics Domain
- (FAI) Using AI to Increase Fairness by Improving Access to Justice
Brief Biography
I am Professor of Computer Science, a Senior Scientist with the Learning Research and Development Center (LRDC), and Faculty of the Intelligent Systems Program (ISP), all at the University of Pittsburgh. I moved here from the Garden State (aka New Jersey), where from 1985-2001 I was a member of the Artificial Intelligence Principles Research Department, AT&T Labs - Research (formerly Bell Laboratories); From 1990-1992, I was also an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University. I received my Ph.D. and M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Rochester, and my A.B. in Mathematics and Computer Science from the College of William and Mary in Virginia. Here are my informal and more formal versions of my academic geneology.
News
- Spring 2022: Digital Futures `Scholar-in-Residence,' KTH Royal Institute of Technology
- December 2021: Invited Talk, JamesFest
- November 2021: Mingzhi Yu defends her dissertation!
- November 2021: AI Tools Help Increase Access to Justice
- November 2021: Invited Talk, AAAI Fall Symposium on Computational Theory of Mind for Human-Machine Teams
- June 2021: Best Paper Award at Workshop for Undergraduates in Educational Data Mining and Learning Engineering (at EDM) for "Essay Revision and Corresponding Grade Change as Captured by Text Similarity and Revision Purposes" by Sonia Cromp and Diane Litman
- April 2021: Panelist, New Challenges for Educational Technology in the Time of the Pandemic, 16th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications
- April 2021: Pitt Momentum Funds Teaming Grant for "Center for Text Analytic Methods in Legal Studies" (K. Ashley (PI), D. Litman, D. He, R. Hwa, J. Anderson (Co-PIs))
- 2021: Pitt Cyber Accelerator Grant for "Influence Detection through Multimodal Discourse and Vividness Analysis" (A. Kovashka (PI), D. Litman, R. Hwa, M. Alikhani, Y. Lin, T. Provins, J. Cohn (co-PIs))
- 2021: New Member (through 2025), University of Rochester Goergen Institute for Data Science External Advisory Committee
- 2021: New Member (3-year term), ETS Visiting Panel on Research
- 2021: New Member, Advisory Board, Center for Integrative Research in Computing and Learning Science (CIRCLS)
- January 2021: New NSF grant awarded (on legal argumentation/summarization for fairness) (NSF Announcement)
- Archived News
Editorial
- Associate Editor, International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education
- Editorial Board, Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research
- Editorial Board, Argument and Computation
PCs (2021, 2022)
- 22nd Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education
- 8th Workshop on Argument Mining (at EMNLP)
- 16th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (at EACL)
- AAAI Spring Symposium on Artificial Intelligence for K-12 Education
- 1st Workshop on Document-grounded Dialogue and Conversational QA (ACL-IJCNLP)
- LAK22 Writing Analytics for Higher-order Thinking Skills Workshop
Professor